After FractalFusion more or less found the workings of what makes the cannon successfully destroy the colony, I decided to do this run for a quick change of pace. So, I say welcome to my first submission of many for the year :)

Emulator - PCSX 0.0.7

Hardest difficulty

Takes damage to save time

No annoying Alia mid-stage dialog boxes beyond the intro

Good ol' introductory stage

This stage went by fairly quickly, except for the fact that you're interrupted by Alia every 5 seconds. It's slightly faster to do a normal walljump and not a dash walljump when climbing up a wall that's moving towards you. The bossfight here goes by quite fast, excluding the last hit which is done when it is so as to get the rng to something that'll work with the cutscene to make the cannon fire successfully. The delay in the cutscene is also for this reason, as the flashes change the rng value aswell.

Virus Blue

The first of the 3 Virus levels. This one has many annoying lasers of doom that would surely kill you many times over if you were playing the game for the first time. I take damage to get through the 2 ride armor enemies as opposed to killing them as it takes less time. The last laser can't be avoided by jumping past it, so an airdash or regular dash must be used to pass it instead. Not much to say about the boss, although you might recognize it from somewhere.

Virus Purple

The second of the Virus stages, I destroy quite a number of the ride armor enemies, as it's faster to destroy them (32 frames) if the invincibility you get from taking damage (~42-45 frames for the damage animation, ~70 frames of invincibility) wont benefit you. The rope "climbing" at the end is done every 7 frames to maximize vertical gain. Not much to say about this boss either, but you might recognize this one too (although it's had a bit of a makeover).

Virus Red

The third and final Virus stage. This one is pretty straight forward. The only thing worth mentioning is that the ledge on the right side of the spike pit has a ridiculously small grab area of about 2 pixels, making it essentially impossible to do realtime. Boss wise, X just stands there and lets me destroy him, although according to the dialog, he gave me a hard time by using soul body. How peculiar.

Final Stage

It probably has a better name than that, but I don't really know it. The final stage contains a ridiculous amount of spiked ceilings at the start followed by spiked pits in the middle, making it a little difficult to move smoothly. When it comes to the boss rush however, it certainly is a rush as they all go down pretty quickly despite having more than twice the amount (127) of HP they'd normally have. Axel the Red will jump to the other side of the arena and do his thorn whip grab attack if I attacked him while I was just standing there, which is why I seemingly wasted time while waiting for him to make his next move.

The programmers must've had a grudge against the players to do this. The odd number of HP is also why I try to end each boss battle with a 3 hit combo, as it is a frame or two faster than an airslash if all 3 hits connect.

After this part, I grab an energy capsule for the next area, as it's quite painful. Skipping past that, right before the final boss door I grab the full energy capsule despite the fact I don't get hit in the following bossfights. This is because when I didn't grab it, I was unable to get sigma to just stand there like he does, even when delaying things and doing stuff.

Sigma 2 is a lot better than I thought it would've been, as he doesn't get a chance to use his purple squares of doom that deal 25 damage if they hit you. After that, there's basically text text and more text until the end of the movie file.

The most obvious improvement I could see to this run would be removal of the wait at the start for the rng to be in a state where the cannon will fire with no delay on text and minimal delay on bossfight.

I didn't test whether or not getting the ultimate armor for X would be a plausible strategy for the final stage, but I doubt it'd be worthwhile due to a capsule scene and a longer stage bossfight. Not to mention that zero dominates basically every boss anyway through SDC-ing.

If I were to suggest a screenshot, it would surely have to be this:

The end rank for X is B, and for Zero it's GA. According to the ingame timer, this TAS apparently comes in at 5 minutes 50 seconds for completion time. Wonder how the hell it came to that conclusion?

Main thanks for this go to FractalFusion for finding useful information that without, I couldn't have made this. Also to ShinyDoofy for mirroring the video.

Overall, I hope you enjoy watching this submission :)

Truncated: Though the reception seems to be a little bit mixed on this one, I think it is good enough for publication. It certainly looks TAS-y.